Whenever someone asks a poll question about how much people would be willing to pay to something, I wonder how much of the answer is liquidity constrained. People who live paycheck to paycheck (a majority of Americans) who literally wouldn’t be able to pay a week’s income for any new expense might just not engage with the counterfactual in quite the way that it was intended.
There’s also an asymmetry between gains and losses, partly due to prospect theory, and partly due to decreasing marginal utility. I bet a lot of people would answer differently if they were asked what they would choose if given the choice between receiving the money vs. going back to the way things were before.
Whenever someone asks a poll question about how much people would be willing to pay to something, I wonder how much of the answer is liquidity constrained. People who live paycheck to paycheck (a majority of Americans) who literally wouldn’t be able to pay a week’s income for any new expense might just not engage with the counterfactual in quite the way that it was intended.
There’s also an asymmetry between gains and losses, partly due to prospect theory, and partly due to decreasing marginal utility. I bet a lot of people would answer differently if they were asked what they would choose if given the choice between receiving the money vs. going back to the way things were before.